Wrexham owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have charmed local fans and cracked America - how Man Utd would love to say the same about the Glazers

Wrexham are causing a stir on their tour of the United States. They played in front of 50,000 fans against Chelsea in Chapel Hill, and when they take on Manchester United at the Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego on Tuesday, 35,000 people will be in attendance.

Tickets for the game, which was announced in a hilarious video with McElhenney, Reynolds and United’s legendary former manager Sir Alex Ferguson, sold out in a matter of hours. While the majority of the stadium will likely be supporting the Red Devils, the Dragons will have thousands of their own supporters out in force.

Nathan Salt, Wrexham fan and co-host of the Rob Ryan Red podcast, went to the games against the Galaxy and Chelsea, and was astonished to see the support for the Dragons stateside.

"The atmosphere was crazy in all honesty," Salt told GOAL. "People were telling me they had driven 13 hours in some cases to come to watch Wrexham solely because they were 'all in' from the documentary. They said they instantly felt connected to the fanbase through the show and that the idea of the pyramid made the team incredibly attractive.

"A lot of the 50,000 crowd in North Carolina were rooting for them. Manchester United is a different beast entirely, but the amount of people who came up to me to say their first trip out the States was going to be to Wrexham was mind-blowing."

McElhenney and Reynolds are obviously the driving force behind Wrexham’s surge in popularity, and before the Hollywood actors got involved, few people outside of north Wales cared about them.

United’s popularity, meanwhile, has very little to do with the Glazer family. Indeed, they have driven fans away, such as the thousands of supporters who boycotted the Red Devils after the 2005 takeover to launch non-league club FC United of Manchester and have not been back to Old Trafford since.

There has inevitably been some cynicism about McElhenney and Reynolds' involvement in Wrexham, particularly from rival fans and the occasional opposition player. But as well as attracting legions of new supporters, the North American owners have got the local and most loyal Wrexham fans on board too.

The pair’s status as charismatic, world-famous actors has certainly helped win people over, but they have also focused on the local community and invested in the club’s future. If only United fans could say the same about their owners.

One thing that both sets of owners have in common is that they generate huge media interest whenever they attend matches. But that is for very different reasons. When McElhenney and Reynolds go to the Racecourse Ground, everyone wants a chat and a selfie.

But when a member of the Glazer family goes to a United game, the reaction is mostly of surprise. And that is because they are almost never present at games. Indeed, even if Avram avoided the media and fans at the Arsenal game, at least he had bothered to go to watch United, which is more than the rest of his family can normally say.

His late father, Malcolm, who bought United in 2005 in a controversial leveraged buyout, never visited Old Trafford once, although he did suffer a stroke shortly after the purchase. Brothers Joel, Avram and Bryan did go to the ground in June 2005, albeit not for a match, and had to be smuggled through the players tunnel and out of the stadium in two police vans after a group of furious supporters turned up.

Joel and Bryan returned in 2007 for a Champions League match against Sporting CP, and a day later were set upon by fans in a restaurant. They were escorted out by security into a car, only for the supporters to follow them, squirting ketchup over the vehicle and banging on the windows.

Fellow siblings and directors, Kevin, Darcie and Edward, are even less involved than Avram and Joel. Along with Bryan, they are reportedly in favour of relinquishing their roles and selling the club outright to either Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani or INEOS CEO Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

Avram, who along with Joel is reportedly more reluctant to sell up and give up his position as director, is now the most visible member of the family. But still he only attends major one-off games, such as the Carabao Cup final and the men’s and women’s FA Cup finals. And he flies in on a private jet, billing the club around £250,000 per visit, according to The Athletic.

By contrast, McElhenney and Reynolds are practically regulars at the Racehorse Ground, despite needing to take a 12-hour flight to get there from Los Angeles. They were both there for the crunch match in the National League run-in against Notts Country and the FA Cup tie with Sheffield United. They were both also in attendance to see the Dragons clinch promotion against Boreham Wood in April, leading wild celebrations.

Wrexham goalkeeper Ben Foster explained that they go to “one in every three matches”. “It’s so cool and weird at the same time," he told CBS Sports. And even when they cannot be at matches, they are in contact with the players.

"They're always on WhatsApp after the game hitting you up with a 'well done today, fantastic performance'. That's the cool bit," Foster added.

You don’t have to be a financial expert to know that Wrexham are worth a fraction of United’s value, but, relatively speaking, McElhenney and Reynolds have both invested significantly more of their own wealth into their club than the Glazers have when you consider its value.

The Glazer family purchased United for £790m ($1bn) in 2005, but only stumped up £200m ($256m) of their own cash, saddling the Red Devils with eye-watering debt in the process. Since the takeover, the Glazers have taken more than £1.6 billion ($2bn) out of United, according to football finance blogger Kieron O’Connor of the Swiss Ramble, in the form of directors’ fees, dividends, selling Class A shares and obliging United to pay out £743m ($954m) in interest payments to service the debt.

The one positive of the Glazers ownership of United has been overseeing a boom in commercial revenue, which has risen from $86m per year in 2009 to $313m per year by 2022. The club have reinvested some of that commercial revenue, plus income from television rights, into the squad, giving United the second-highest wage bill in the Premier League and allowing them to spend £229m ($294m) last year on transfers and a further £100m ($128m) this summer to get Mason Mount and Andre Onana.

But in terms of owner funding between 2012 and 2021, United ranked bottom of the Premier League on minus £154m (-$197m). They have invested hardly any of their own money beyond the £200m ($257m) they paid in 2005 to purchase the club, just a quarter of the club's value at the time.

By contrast, McElhenney and Reynolds used all their own money to buy Wrexham for around £2m ($2.5m) in 2020 and since then have invested an estimated £10m ($12.8m) into the club, fuelling their promotion back to the Football League for the first time in 15 years.

Their ownership has led to the club's turnover soaring by 404 percent, but it has come at a personal cost to the pair, who made a loss of nearly £3m ($3.8m) in the last year due to rising players' wages and other costs.

Another big difference between Wrexham's Hollywood owners and the Glazers is their investment in infrastructure. McElhenney and Reynolds loaned the club £3.6m ($4.6m) to buy the freehold of the Racecourse Ground and have announced plans to expand the stadium, including building a new 5,500-capacity stand to make the ground four-sided.

And they have plans to develop the club's training ground. "We are working on that pretty much daily," Reynolds told the Rob Ryan Red podcast. "The training ground is not something that you take trivially, right? So it is something that is going to need to exist for decades, if not centuries to come. So it’s something Rob and I have been working on. Well, we’ve been working on that since last year, really.”

The Glazers, meanwhile, have been complacent with United's infrastructure after inheriting the biggest club stadium in the UK and a modern training ground when they bought the club. Under their watch, almost no work has been done to modernise Old Trafford (the 2005 expansion was planned before they took charge), which now lags behind the likes of Anfield, the Emirates Stadium, the Etihad Stadium and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The roof in the South Stand has been known to leak in heavy rain - quite a common occurrence in Manchester - and it feels vastly overcrowded.

During his infamous interview with Piers Morgan last year, Cristiano Ronaldo explained that United's training ground had undergone almost no upgrades between 2009, when he left for Real Madrid, and when he returned in 2021.

"I thought everything had changed because it's 13 years since I change. I was in Real Madrid nine years and three in Juventus. And when I arrived, I thought everything will be different, you know, the technology, the infrastructures and everything," he said. "But I was surprised, in a bad way, let's say in that way… because I saw, everything was the same. Nothing changed. Surprisingly. Not only the pool, the jacuzzi, even the gym."

United's game with Wrexham in San Diego is a meeting between the best-supported British club in the States and the fastest-growing club. The Red Devils have been visiting the U.S. since 2003 and have 46 officially recognised supporters clubs across 26 states. Their 2014 friendly with Real Madrid in Michigan attracted 109,000 fans, making it the best-attended football game ever in the country.

Wrexham are unlikely to get close to United's popularity, but the 'Welcome to Wrexham' documentary has made their players stars, and they were mobbed on the wild trip to Las Vegas to celebrate the promotion.

Foster explained to Leader Live:  "You are going to get mobbed if you are Manchester United, but nobody else gets that much fanfare in America. But some of the lads here are household names in America, they are proper famous.

"We know that when we go into these games, there are going to be fans cheering for us. I have played in America with Manchester United and West Brom, with West Brom we didn't get any fans. We might have taken 100 travelling fans, but the rest are all just American fans."

But the owners have not just converted Americans to the Wrexham cause, they have breathed life into a long-suffering community of local supporters. As well as boosting the local economy due to the influx of visitors, Reynolds and McElhenney have embraced the local area, helping raise funds for a local hospital, giving to food banks and donating £10,000 to a charity fundraiser after the death of Wrexham player Jordan Davies' baby.

They have also immersed themselves in the history of the town. In the second series of 'Welcome to Wrexham', McElhenney visits the town’s Miners Rescue Centre to learn more about the 1934 disaster in nearby Gresford where 266 people lost their lives. And local fans are as much as part of the story as the club's players.

The Glazers, meanwhile, have made zero effort to embrace Manchester, unlike Manchester City's owners, who have built a new training ground, revitalised the Eastlands area of the city and invested in community activities. And that is a big factor in why City are capturing the next generation of local fans.

The Glazers also have scant dealings with supporters. Since the 2005 takeover, they have made no effort to communicate with fans, shunning media interviews. Joel Glazer did speak with fans via video link in a bid to tame dissent after signing the club up to the Super League, but has not communicated with them since effectively putting the club up for sale last November. Their silence on the takeover, which still has no sign of resolution eight months later, has incensed fans even more.

The match at the Snapdragon Stadium, then, inevitably means more to Wrexham than United, who will be fielding a reserve team and have one eye on their clash with Real Madrid the next day in Texas. But their owners could learn a lot from their fellow North Americans McElhenney and Reynolds, who have shown the benefits of embracing local fans and their communities rather than alienating them.